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UK & Ireland

The wonders of Crossrail have been heralded for years, and not without reason. The mammoth scale of the engineering endeavour and the technical achievements are admirable. However, from an urban design perspective, it is much more exciting to study what Crossrail will do for London.

It is notoriously difficult to predict what’s going to happen with new technologies. However, being able to do so is of uttermost importance in the transport sector. Behavioural Economics, if applied correctly, can help in this almost impossible quest of predicting the speed of adoption of new technology. To illustrate this, we use two very different types of technology, Uber and Electric Vehicles.

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are often viewed as the ideal solution for governments balancing limited budgets and growing infrastructure demands. However, as the failure of some high-profile toll-highway PPPs illustrates, implementing such projects is often not as straightforward as many governments envision. One of the most common factors contributing to these failures is traffic volumes that turn out to be significantly different from what was originally forecast.

A phrase much used in the alternative fuels industry is the ‘chicken and egg problem’. Without demand for recharging and refuelling alternative-fuel vehicles there is no case for investment in infrastructure; but without infrastructure to recharge/refuel them, most people will not buy alternative fuelled vehicles. There is a solution to this problem, but it requires action from both the public and private sectors, new and innovative business models, and perhaps most importantly a long-term approach.